People don't fully understand what is at risk of being lost here. Science, history, and technology tutorials, practical life skills like cooking, budgeting, mental health, chronic illness, trauma recovery, creative expression, small businesses, home repair, friend groups, communities, and many people who make their living on TikTok. Losing TikTok means losing a massive ecosystem and all of its connections, knowledge, and content. It's like a library of books vanishing, or a large city disappearing off of a map.

Popular sites come and go. It has admittedly been a few years since we had a big shakeup of where people go to doomscroll, but this is not a paradigm shift -- it is just a chance to see who picks up the slack. It is mildly interesting speculating on whether an existing site will absorb it or if something new will come along. And it is possible TikTok will just keep running. But either way, people gonna make content, people gonna consume content.

This is always the risk of building your castle on someone else's land (or cloud).

It's insulting to compare libraries to TikTok.

TikTok isn't going away and the content isn't going away. It's just not accessible in the US.

a lot of chronic illness sub communities are bad and would be good to lose, just like cryptic pregnancy fb etc - they trigger latent mental illness in people

We have an archiving institution for stuff like that. Relying on a private business to maintain a catalogue is nonsense.

Is no one downloading the best content?

I download all my favorite YouTube videos because inevitably some disappear.

There are plenty of other places they can upload that content.

All of these points apply to YouTube, which has arguably higher quality content on all of those things.

We also risk losing so much utter nonsense and false information that I'm not at all worried. You want to learn history and science? Buy some (vetted) history and science books.

The number of times I had to correct my step-son when he repeated something he "learned" on TikTok is disturbing.

Unimportant example: He "learned" from a TikTok video that the commonly repeated command of "Open sesame!" is actually "Open says me!". That's not true, and all you have to do is read the story "Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves" to know that the story actually hinges on the fact that the secret word is the name of a grain/plant.

Another example: He "learned" that the video game character, Mario, is not saying "It's a me, Mario!" with an Italian accent. He "learned" that he is actually saying some Japanese word, like "Itsumi Mario!".

One more: He "learned" that "scientists" now think that "we" originally put the T-Rex fossils together incorrectly and that the animal's arm bones are actually backwards, and should be reversed to reveal that the T-Rex actually had little chicken wings instead of small arms. Anybody who has seen how bone sockets fit together knows that's nonsense.

Forgetting the political theory and morality of the ban, I say good riddance to the constant firehose of bullshit and lying morons on that app.

And for every video of quality on the platform, there's one that's blatant political propaganda, one that's blatant conspiratorial misinformation, one that's sexualizing children, etc.

It's a mixed bag. It has no more to offer than any other social network. Less, some might argue, because of how easy it is to crosspost to the other video networks.

The only way this is different from the loss of other social networks, Vine most closely, is the government is shutting down the site and collapsing the ecosystem rather than private equity.

You honestly believe most of that hasn't already be re-uploaded to other platforms and more of it won't be re-uploaded over the next month?

Nothing will be lost. It will be trivial to access this content, obviously. The internet has gotten extremely adept at routing around censorship.

No one is deleting data. You just can't run the app in the US anymore. If someone cares to archive this junk, they can just do it from Australia or wherever.

[flagged]

[flagged]